A case study comparing quantitative stability-flexibility relationships across five metallo-β-lactamases highlighting differences within NDM-1.

The Distance Constraint Model (DCM) is an ensemble-based biophysical model that integrates thermodynamic and mechanical viewpoints of protein structure. The DCM outputs a large number of structural characterizations that collectively allow for Quantified Stability-Flexibility Relationships (QSFR) to be identified and compared across protein families. Using five metallo-β-lactamases (MBLs) as a representative set, we demonstrate how QSFR properties are both conserved and varied across protein families.

Pre-Columbian urbanism, anthropogenic landscapes, and the future of the Amazon.

The archaeology of pre-Columbian polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reconsideration of early urbanism and long-term change in tropical forest landscapes. We describe settlement and land-use patterns of complex societies on the eve of European contact (after 1492) in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. These societies were organized in articulated clusters, representing small independent polities, within a regional peer polity.

The legacy of cultural landscapes in the Brazilian Amazon: implications for biodiversity.

For centuries Amazonia has held the Western scientific and popular imagination as a primordial forest, only minimally impacted by small, simple and dispersed groups that inhabit the region. Studies in historical ecology refute this view. Rather than pristine tropical forest, some areas are better viewed as constructed or 'domesticated' landscapes, dramatically altered by indigenous groups in the past.

Amazonia 1492: pristine forest or cultural parkland?

Archaeology and indigenous history of Native Amazonian peoples in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil reveal unexpectedly complex regional settlement patterns and large-scale transformations of local landscapes over the past millennium. Mapping and excavation of archaeological structures document pronounced human-induced alteration of the forest cover, particularly in relation to large, dense late-prehistoric settlements (circa 1200 to 1600 A.D.